Jigsaw Love Note

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Sometimes in the middle of a conversation some piece of a puzzle just fits in place, some circuit is completed in my brain, and I know I’m just a little bit more destroyed for you.
Boss, you’re my thousand piece jigsaw, bro. And I’m sitting down with you on a large, old wooden table, under a lamp with yellow light, and endless cups of chai. And I hope I never put all the pieces together. I hope you’re impossible to solve. And I can keep poring over you, until it’s dawn and another night sets in, and all the nights after that. I hope I owe you all my dark circles.

Living on the Fringes

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That’s it. That’s how frail and how strong life is. Everything hinges on a moment’s decision.
And so, like never before, Carpe Diem.
I suppose working in an ER creates an exaggerated sense of how unpredictable life can be, but it works for me because I need regular reminders to keep pushing myself across comfort zones.
If not now, then when? If not me, then whom?

The Terrace Anecdote

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Sitting on a cushion on a grey cement terrace,  an occasional breeze and a tentative spray of rain, the clouds reflected in my cup of tea and the sound of Rahman in Tamil mixed with a distant ambulance.
Brightly coloured clothes clips hand from bare yellow clothes wires on the adjacent terrace.
There is very little missing from this.

In Pursuit of Happiness

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There is always another side to every picture,
Another dimension to every person,
Another version of an old story,  passed down the generations.
It makes you wonder, how much of life is just perception, and how little the absolute truth.
Is happiness just a matter of another paradigm shift?

Pencil me into your Plans

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Let me pencil this out for you
Let me make the plans, and iron out  the wrinkles in your shirt.
Lean back,  feel my cool fingers on your forehead,
Let them try and erase the valleys of distress.
Let me do this for myself, for my joy, with everything I have.
But take me for granted,
And the genie in your lamp will abscond.
In a snap.

Let it Play

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Let it play, she said, giving me a dose of my own medicine.
Let’s let go of all the paraphernalia cluttering our consciousness, I said, more to myself than anyone else. 
And from him, there was only radio silence, as if words in themselves would unnecessarily entangle issues.
I wish you were here, has become a persistent throbbing background track to everything else that happens in my mind. Without being all consuming, it’s always there, just around the corner of a thought.

Finally finished Regret. The simple words bring out the truth in the anecdotes, and made them real enough for me to fall asleep with a dull ache in my chest.

A Dream Lies Dead : Lessons in Poetry

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A dream lies dead here.
May you softly go 
Before this place, and turn away your eyes, 
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies 
Importuning Life for life.
Walk not in woe, 
But, for a little, let your step be slow. 
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise 
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies. 
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know: 

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree- 
Though white of bloom as it had been before 
And proudly waitful of fecundity- 
One little loveliness can be no more; 
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head 
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead.

Dorothy Parker

The Edges of Print

The Handmaid’s Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

Year: 1985

“WE were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

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As I attempt to write my way through my running blues, Pepper comforts me with a protective presence and a flicking tail.